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Latest pings may not have come from Flight 370 after all

Searchers trolling the Indian Ocean for clues to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are growing more skeptical that some of the electronic signals detected far off the Australian coast came from

Latest pings may not have come from Flight 370 after all

Searchers trolling the Indian Ocean for clues to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are growing more skeptical that some of the electronic signals detected far off the Australian coast came from the jet's black boxes.

The flight disappeared from communications and radar tracking systems about an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, bound for Beijing on March 8. A massive and costly international search has failed to recover any sign of the plane or the 239 people aboard.

The plane's two data recorders, known as black boxes, were designed to emit signals via battery-power. But the battery life was only about 30 days. An Australian search vessel detected what authorities had determined could be "pings" from the black boxes on April 5 and April 8.

The pings, more than 1,000 miles off Australia, have been used to narrow the laborious underwater search.

The Wall Street Journal reports that authorities now suspect only the two transmissions detected April 5 are relevant to the search. Australian naval Cmdr. James Lybrand, captain of the Ocean Shield search vessel, told the Journal that a close analysis of signals detected April 8 raised doubt that they were from a man-made device.

Each of the transmissions on April 8 were intermittent and at a frequency of around 27 kHz — much lower than the 37.5 kHz frequency that black box beacons were designed to emit, Lybrand said. The April 5 transmissions were 33.3 kHz, Lybrand told the Journal.

Authorities remain hopeful that two April 5 signals are relevant, saying the low frequency could have been the result of weakening batteries and difficult deep-sea conditions, the Journal reported.

There are few other clues.

Signals picked up early in the search by British navy vessel HMS Echo were later determined to have been noises from the ship itself. A detection from a sonar buoy dropped in the ocean came from a passing commercial freighter.

While the search drags on, with a cost already estimated at $60 million, authorities also have turned their attention to ensuring that future flights do not end in mystery. To that end, Inmarsat Plc, a provider of global mobile satellite communications services, said Monday it will offer free basic tracking services for planes flying over oceans.

The British company said the service is being offered to all 11,000 commercial passenger planes already equipped with an Inmarsat satellite connection — most of the world's long-distance commercial fleet.

"This offer responsibly, quickly and at little or no cost to the industry, addresses in part the problem brought to light by the recent tragic events around MH370," Inmarsat CEO Rupert Pearce told the Associated Press.